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it was arthur c clarke who famously once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic 3d printing is a technology in its early stages but it's one that allows you to summon a small inanimate object into existence with basically speech which sounds like magic so 3d printing is exactly what it is you're printing something out in three dimensions there's multiple ways to do it the most common way is FDM imagine a hot glue gun that's sitting on two tracks and it has a plan that's uploaded to it and it lays down the plastic in lines then does another layer on top of that and does this continuously until you have your completed product when this technology became available to the average person it changed everything I had allowed hobbyists and professionals to print out an enormous array of objects everything from replacement game pieces to replacement machine parts even medical prosthetics all of these objects started out as computer designs which were then printed out in real space made with real materials you start out with your 3d file that's your blueprint so you take that 3d model and you feed it to a program called a slicer the slicer lays out line by line instructions for your specific printer of what to do hours later you come back and you've got your product but some people have raised concerns what if you wanted to print a gun would that be allowed would that be safe [Music] the 3d printed gun debate isn't new it's been around for years which makes sense because printing out a gun is actually a lot more complicated than it sounds it's complicated physically this isn't like printing out a PDF it's a little bit more involved in that you have to know a little bit more about materials you have to know a little tiny bit of coding as well in order to have a good result this is what people imagine when they think about 3d printing guns they think that they're gonna go home to their printer hit the button and then they're gonna come back and there's gonna be a Glock sitting there and they're just gonna put rounds of the you know and it and have it be good to go no because if you try to print out a typical gun in all plastic and you went and fired with a normal round in it it would explode and it would injure you the technology is pretty advanced we've seen a lot of good progress but it is certainly nowhere near the point where you can just hit print and then have a fully competent firearm it's all so complicated legally at least in the United States basically the ATF Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives will make a determination on a firearms design and they will declare what part of the gun is the receiver this is the part of the gun where you need a background check to purchase through a dealer you know that can't be shipped directly to your house what they decide is the receiver is kind of random and unprincipled so on the ar-15 it's the lower receiver which is just the box which holds the trigger unit on the ak-47 it's a hunk of steel that is basically the barrel is connected to it everything is connected to it on the FN FAL it is where the barrel screws into in fact there's no trigger components in it whatsoever so it could be random it can be random completely so on a lot of these designs like the ar-15 the receiver is not under a lot of stress so for those types of designs 3d printing can produce a pretty effective receiver and then you can assemble the rest of the gun with off-the-shelf parts and have it last you know a few hundred rounds they generally haven't gotten to the point where they're as reliable or as effective as an off-the-shelf weapon but it's it's definitely matured for other guns where the receiver is under stress like the a K like the FAL and like many other designs there's just no to print it out of plastic in other countries all of the stuff's regulated so there's not really much advantage or concern about whether what the US government considers a receiver so that's when you get into talking about the fully 3d printed guns that is not developed the thing to remember about guns in the United States is that it's actually not illegal to make them yourself and 3d printing doesn't change that you are allowed to make your own guns and you always have been in this country there's nothing different about 3d printing when you make your gun you can't make it with the intention of selling it so you can't just start up your printer and start pumping out lower receivers to to solve the people you can't just make it a machine gun without registering it you know you can't just make it a short-barrel rifle for a barrel shotgun without registering it it does have to follow those rules but if it does follow those rules and is just a normal firearm it's pretty much good to go usually granted 3d printed guns are a little bit different but for an unusual reason see anything 3d printed starts as a computer file usually a 3d model that someone has designed but that file is just a file until the person who wants to do the printing takes that file and configures it specially so that it'll work on their particular printer this means that if a designer sends the design for a gun to someone else what they're sending is not a physical product its speech and speech is protected by the First Amendment so a lot of people try to separate 3d printable files from speech by saying well this winds up at making something right something physical happens as a result just because something can be used to create something has nothing to do with whether it's featured on so if I were to speak out my mother's Jamaican oxtail recipe would you say that I have cooked oxtail that day no I spoke I made speech so a recipe is pretty similar to a 3d printable file you can use that information to create something you can also not any design a speech whether it's painted printed or coded it really is a First Amendment issue because the only way you could regulate the technology is by regulating the files if blueprints and recipes are speech then 3d files are speech too and that means that according to the Constitution we have today the government can't prohibit it's only a right if it applies to things you don't like you might hate seeing these gun designs it might bother you you might also hate listening to Nickelback on the radio but that doesn't mean that you can take it down so how do we regulate 3d printed guns what about criminals who might print them for your various purposes so there are a lot of people who were concerned about criminals using this technology to their benefit like people are concerned that they'd print a gun that could get through a metal detector things like that that's really overstate it's not a real concern it's certainly not at the point where you can just hit print and then have a semi-automatic firearm come out it's it's just not there yet and with the materials I doubt it ever will be under our current constitutional framework regulating 3d printed guns is just about impossible the files are impossible to regulate and regulating the printers themselves would destroy a budding industry before it even fully got off the ground the way you'd have to enforce something to actually prevent spreading files would be draconian you'd have to either regulate the printers themselves thereby taking this hugely beneficial technology just off the table for a large number of people or you'd have to be monitoring you know who's posting what where they're going it's really really scary stuff sure there are risks but there are risks with every new technology that are risked with every development and I think that all of the objective benefits that are beyond reproach with 3d printing should be enough to say just leave it alone just don't touch it the world might change 3d printing might advance to the point where printing guns might be easy simple and cheap but in the world we live in right now it doesn't seem like that's the case if your only argument against an emerging technology is that you're scared of it I don't think it should be enough to bind the rest of the country in the meantime we should stop worrying and enjoy the many amazing things 3d printing has to offer you [Music]